Thursday 13 January 2011 07.39 EST
First published on Thursday 13 January 2011 07.39 EST

The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has said he will be looking again at the contract rights renewal regime governing ITV advertising deals, after inheriting responsibility for media competition issues from Vince Cable.

CRR was introduced when Carlton and Granada merged to form ITV plc in 2003, as a competition remedy to ease fears that the enlarged company would abuse its dominant position in the TV advertising market.

Speaking last night, Hunt also said it was "time to be brave" on developing a network of local television stations, and added he was not prepared to prescribe a single model, or be tied down to a restricted number of licences.

Asked whether he was backing the proposals by Nicholas Shott's working party, which in December said between 10 to 15 city-based local TV stations were practical as a first step, Hunt said: "I am not going to say this can only happen in the top 15 cities — when smaller cities come forward, we're not going to say no."

He said he was delighted if groups of operators were "smelling money" and making proposals. Hunt is expected to amplify his response to the Shott report at next week's Oxford Media Convention.

Asked whether he would prefer to back the more optimistic plan of between 80 and 100 local TV stations put forward by Greg Dyke's local TV advisory group, Hunt said he was backing "neither", but preferred to let a number of options and experiments run.

Dyke, a former director general of the BBC, made the proposal in a speech in York, where he said a population of 200,000 people, with a further 200,000 living in adjacent areas, could support a low-cost station, and generate enough local advertising.

Hunt said of local television: "This is not a top-down [policy], it is bottom-up, driven by local groups. I believe that the leadership debates transformed politics. I think local democracy is as important as national democracy, but it is very weak."

He added that local television, with Jeremy Paxman-style hosts, could play its part in holding town halls to account.

Hunt also told the meeting that he knew that Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, had been disappointed with the hastily negotiated BBC licence fee deal agreed last October, which had prevented a wider review of the corporation's scale and funding this year.

"I bumped into him at a lecture. He indicated to me he was very unhappy with the licence fee settlement," he said.

When pressed for details of what Murdoch said, Hunt replied: "It was more his facial expressions."

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